IT’S A brave soul who brings together the forces of several choral societies in the hope that they will all, to use an awful modern cliché, sing off the same hymn sheet.

  But that’s what David Holroyd does. He amalgamates the groups for which he is the driving force – Birkenhead and Formby Choral Societies, as well as the various choral forces deployed at Merchant Taylors’ School, in Crosby – and it all works, probably because his training techniques are common to all.

And that helped, demonstrably in the performance of Bernstein’s emotive and highly challenging Chichester Psalms.

This is an immensely difficult work to perform remotely convincingly, and the choirs did that.

Holroyd set a very deliberate tempo in the first Psalm and, right from the huge choral sound at the opening – with some startlingly good sounds from the male singers – this movement held together, something at which many revered professional groups have baulked. The highlight had to be the ravishingly innocent, yet highly mature, singing of treble James Orrell.

Things became slightly messy at the end with Holroyd struggling to keep an excitable Liverpool Sinfonia percussion section in hand.

In the final psalm, the men, so good at the outset, struggled and the orchestral interludes were not good. The intense and sweeping crescendo which builds towards the work’s conclusion, with all its delicate tonal elisions, was something of an anticlimax.

Mezzo-soprano Victoria Byron gave a splendid performance of Elgar’s Sea Pictures. Hers is a rich voice which does not peter out in its lower registers – and Elgar makes substantial de-ands of that part of the singer’s regis- ter. The languid Slumber-Song and the gentle In Haven grew into the intensity of the famed Where Corals Lie. But Sabbath Morning at Sea, which has some of Elgar’s best orchestral writing, was a disappointment. Liverpool Sinfonia, so often the stars of the show, seemed not to be on form for this performance, though they did warm to the final movement, The Swimmer.

The Armed Man, the final work, is vintage Karl Jenkins. It is inclusive, melding the Christian mass with the Muslim call to prayer, among other things.

It’s akin to those 16th-century masses built on popular tunes and it bears a resemblance to Britten’s War Requiem, combining the traditional service setting with secular poetry. 

There’s not a great deal of original choral writing here and, overall, sentimentality often rules, rather.

The choral forces, again, acquitted themselves well: strong, dependable. There was a great deal of energy and commitment to the performance, though the work inflicts little demand on the audience.

Again, the orchestra felt a little challenged on occasions, with the cello solos sounding decidedly shaky at times.